Payment Gateway Comparison For Your Online Shop

As a business owner with an e-commerce website, you know how important it is that the whole transaction is smooth, quick and easily accessible. We go through a payment gateway comparison for your online shop.

Browsing and buying your product/service is key to the customer experience, but what about paying for it? How do you ensure you create a good quality end-to-end customer experience, which is also good for you? Which payment gateways will work best for your business and be economically viable at the same time?

Read on for our comparison of some of the best known and most used payment gateways:

Stripe

Stripe is the new kid on the block having only been established in 2010. It doesn’t have an offline option but has a lot of flexibility online including being able to create regular subscriptions and offer mobile payments which put it ahead of some of its competitors.

Pricing with Stripe is good, in the fact that there is no monthly fee, the fees are fairly transparent and quite low in cost. You will find though that fees are the same for credit and debit cards, and that it’s fairly complex to integrate so probably not the best option for small businesses.

PayPal

PayPal is one of the big players and seems to have been around forever. A well-trusted brand, PayPal has fairly simple payment mechanisms, and is easy to use so is better for the small business owner rather than Stripe.

One of the key differences between PayPal and Stripe is that PayPal fees tend to be slightly higher.

Sage Pay

One of the key benefits of Sage Pay above the other payment gateways is that you can also use Sage Pay at the point of sale and on the telephone so it’s great for diverse use.

Sage Pay comes with the brand of the Sage accounting software, so it’s well trusted. Sage Pay has a flat fee per transaction, rather than a percentage of the transaction cost. This means if you’re making bigger sales this is likely to work out better for you.

The downside is that opening an account isn’t always speedy. It can take up to five weeks to activate and authorise accounts, so one of the other payment gateways would be a better option for taking transactions quickly. It also has a monthly fee, so again better for organisations with a larger turnover.

Worldpay

Worldpay offers a global payment system and if you’re a larger business making international sales, this is a very secure option. It’s well-known, trusted and offers fraud screening.

There is a monthly fee, although with larger numbers of transactions charges can decrease, therefore this benefits a business with bulk sales. It isn’t really ideal for small businesses, and it can take some time to set your account up, but it’s a good option for large, global e-commerce organisations.

Having compared the four, you’ll see that if you’re a small business with limited technical knowledge PayPal is likely to be the best option for you. If you operate outside of the e-commerce world and need telephone or point of sale payments, then Sage Pay is the one that offers this seamlessly.

Stripe is great for flexibility and taking multiple types of digital payments and Worldpay is first class when it comes to large, international companies.